Due to the proliferation of battery powered wireless communications devices, and the constant pressure to do more computing in smaller devices, extending battery life for as long as possible in these devices has become an important goal in the industry. Various techniques have been developed to reduce power consumption by placing all or part of the battery powered wireless communications device into low power modes under certain circumstances. Because the transmit operation generally creates the biggest drain on power, much of this effort has been directed to reducing power consumption that is tied to transmit operations. But other operations have been comparatively neglected in this effort.